Our stories of rapid risers will demonstrate more than once that it isn’t necessary for you, personally, to be walloped with a bright idea to join this fast company. In many cases the first man to conceive an idea – the originator, the inventor – remains a plodder and vanishes into obscurity. The big success is scored by the second man who comes around: the man who sees the idea’s potential, who develops it, who applies a needed element of aggressiveness to it and lifts it off the ground.
This chain of events repeats itself so often in the annals of instant success that we might as well dignify it with a label all its own. Call it the “second-man effect.” We’ll try to dissect it more thoroughly later, but at the moment let’s look briefly at a nearby legendary fellow who illustrates the “second-man effect” with great clarity. His name: Edward John Noble.
The legend began in the early 1900s with a man named Clarence Crane. Crane was the “first man” – the loser.
He had a small candy-manufacturing operation in Cleveland, Ohio. His main business was in chocolate candies, but as a sideline he also manufactured hard mints. Lacking space and equipment, he paid a pill manufacturer to press the mints into shape for him. Because of some minor technical difficulties, the pillmaker found that the mints could be stamped out most cleanly if there were a hole in the middle. The white, ring-shaped mints suggested their own name. Crane called them Life Savers.
Poor old Clarence Crane didn’t discover the fact until too late, but he was sitting on a gold mine.
Meanwhile young Edward John Noble was working in the advertising business in New York. One day shortly before the outbreak of Word War I he chanced to see a roll of Crane’s Life Savers in a New York store. They were new to him. He bought them on impulse, tried them and liked them. He was intrigued by the shape and the name.
He wondered why they weren’t more widely known, and being an adman he felt he answer was obvious. Life Savers ought to be advertised. He boarded a train to Cleveland with the idea of selling Crane a promotional scheme.
Crane wasn’t interested. Young Nobel applied he hard sell, talked lyrically of he unique shape and attractive taste of Life Savers, sketched glorious visions of the wealth that might accrue to Clarence Crane if only he would advertise. Finally Crane became exasperated, and he unwittingly uttered his own doom. “If you think Life Savers are all that good,” he said, “why don’t you manufacture the damned things yourself?”
Recovering from his initial shock, Noble probed and discovered Crane was serious. The Cleveland candymaker was willing to sell the formula and all rights to Liver Savers for a few thousand dollars.
The price finally agreed upon was $2,900. Noble put up part of the money himself and found a friend to put up the rest.
Clarence Crane pocketed the money and, as he saying goes, lived to regret it.
The friend had some early doubts about his investment. His regrets evaporated quickly, however. When he sold his interest 12 years later, he walked off with a profit of better than 200,000 percent.
For there was something about Life Savers that grabbed the American public, grabbed hard and grabbed fast. Noble’s newborn little company didn’t have to go through the long, weary struggle that usually attends the births of companies. There were only a few early problems. The most formidable one had to do with the packaging. Crane had been using a cardboard cylinder which, after too long a time on the shelf, tended to absorb the mint oil and give Life Savers a mealy flavor. After some experimenting, Noble hit on the idea of wrapping the mints in tinfoil and covering the foil with a paper sleeve – essentially the same packaging that is used today.
Having solved that problem, Noble put his adman’s talents to work. Recalling how he had picked up his own first roll of Life Savers, he figured they would be bought mainly on impulse. He designed a special display carton that stores, restaurants, bars and other establishments could keep next to their cash registers. He set a price of five cents a roll. At first he sold Life Savers to bars around New York City. The bars’ customers often wanted something to kill beer and whiskey breath, and within weeks Noble was getting repeat orders. Next he sold the idea to United Cigar stores, which had more than 1000 retail outlet scattered around the country. As money began to flow in, Noble used it to advertise in newspapers and magazines.
To this day, nobody is quite sure why the public was so quickly and enormously attracted to Life Savers. The taste? Maybe; but there were other mints on the market that tasted just about as good. The odd shape? The convenient size? The neat little package that could be wrapped and rewrapped and slipped into pocket or purse? Nobody knows for sure, but the fact is that Life Savers quickly became the most popular hard candy on the earth. In some years, out of every five pounds of mints and fruit drops sold in the United States, four of those pounds were Life Savers.
Four years after he bought out Clarence Crane for $2,900, Ed Noble was a millionaire.